Are we that stupid?

[Gerald]

5 hours ago, Gunny said:

 

Really? Why bother to wear them at all? Go old school.

, Bare feet.

 

Right and then start using Band Aids on the feet . Maybe make them put better adhesive on them

[kmealy]

18 hours ago, FlGatorwood said:

Well, it does teach you how to write a line for each step.  It does have to trip switches in the binary code.  Humans can think one or 2 steps and then skip to step 10.  We don't realize we do that, but a computer is not that smart, even AI.  The first code I ever read was Fortran, but I was never privileged to write or develop in it.  And, I love the old XBase languages.  Easy, efficient and quick.  

My first language was Fortran also.  Along the way, I used COBOL, PL/1, Basic, Mantis, but spent most of my career in 370 assembler, which we heavily fortified with macros, including introducing structured programming concepts before IBM did (and ours were better) and procedure definition with 4 levels and temporary variables.  I think the system I worked on had around 1,000,000 lines of code and worked on CICS, Environ/1, IMS/DC and batch mode.

 

Fortran stood for "Formula Translator" and was great for numeric operations, not so much for manipulating text.  I think our last lab exercise was to write a Fortran program to read a text formula and using order of operations, for example "3*10.2+4.5+2^5" and compute it.   I think there were less than 10 of us in the 100s of students that got it to work.  Even some of the TAs didn't get it.

Edited December 23, 2020 by kmealy

[FlGatorwood]

I did not have access to the program Fortran to program or write it.  Navy Supply used to be run on large Honeywell and Burroughs main frames and all the code was Fortran.  We had an old glitch that was built in.  When the reworked components came out of rework and back into supply, they would upload the return.  It didn't matter if we had 400 of them on the floor in storage.  The code did not look in the correct field of the stock list.  It looked to see if there was a waiting order in the issue database.  I had the idea, so I asked one of the operators to allow me to look at the code.  Sure enough, verified my suspicions.  So, I submitted a program change request to Mechanicsburg.  The programmer called me about the change.  So, I explained the situation.  I requested that if the stock database had the 1 or more, not to do the backorder process.  That saved a lot of time and frustration among the workers.  And, it was rather easy to understand.  

 

My first programming was in MSDos v. 3.1 with edlin.  What a pain.  Basic and QBasic was so much fun.  So, in class I stretched my wings while the teacher was working with another student.  It goes like this.

 

001  ChooChoo into tunnel

010  Tunnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . .. Choo Choo

020  Tunnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Choo Choo

030  Tunnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choo Choo

 

So, you see the choo choo was moving to the left.  After about 80 lines, I executed it and was surprised that it worked.  A couple of students saw it and aske to see it again.  The teacher came and looked and showed me how to put it in a loop.  The choo choo ran until we hit a key on the keyboard.  I went on to learn dBase II and III, Foxbase and Enable.  Can't remember what Enable was written in.  Then I went into Visual Basic and did some Oracle.  The last one is the one I preferred.  It was great.  Expensive.  

 

Ok, I can't remember what this thread was supposed to be about, so I'll quit posting on this one.  Thanks for the ride.  Memory lane has some sweet spots.  

[p_toad]

Started with Pl/1 at one employer and was told to stop.   Went on to learn JCL backward and forward and on my next job did lots of that and learned COBOL.   One of my programs was to allow operations to print off half-moon tape labels (if you were there, you know what i mean).   When i left there and went to my next place i finally convinced operations (i theoretically wasn't supposed to be a programmer) to request a tape label program like the one i had written the place before.... only it was so bad (i mean really, really bad) that i sat down and rewrote it to make it work right - including console input instead of cards.   when i got kicked upstairs (a different ugly story) i was tasked with learning Unisys assembler (had already learned a lot of ECL when i was in operations).   at some point later i was tasked with support (install and configuration) for a system running MAPPER (a Unisys 4GL) which i eventually learned to program in and did all kinds of stuff (which wasn't in the corporate plan).   That was the end of my programming adventures as I was on the wrong color box and got shuffled off to other adventures.  

Edited December 24, 2020 by p_toad

[Cal]

On 12/23/2020 at 11:36 AM, John Morris said:

By the way folks, if you have not seen the movie, it's a good movie.

 

I thought that was a great movie.

In a similar vein, but the music business, I can recommend "20 feet from Stardom".